by K. R. Bolton
Eliot had converted to the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Church of England in 1927, and he remained an ardent worshipper until his death in 1966. His faith was the crucial element in his thinking and creativity. The most succinct self-description of his outlook was that of a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”161
It was an echo of the statement made in 1913 by the seminal French Rightist and Academician, Charles Maurras, leader of the militant Action Française, describing his “counter-revolutionary” beliefs as “classique, catholique, monarchique,”162 that is to say, the antithesis of the Jacobin foundations of the French Republic. Indeed, Eliot was to state that “most of the concepts which might have attracted me in Fascism I seem already to have found, in a more digestible form, in the work of Charles Maurras. I say in a more digestible form, because I think they have a closer applicability in England than those of Fascism.”163
Because Fascism treated monarchy as “a convenience,” it was unacceptable to Eliot. Nevertheless, it was nonetheless preferable to Communism. His preference was for “the powerful king and the able minister,” rather than the Fascist formula of “a powerful dictator and a nominal king.” Although Maurras was accused of being a fascist and was to be tried as a collaborator after World War II,164 he advocated tradition, not fascism, and was of much interest to Eliot as a leading classicist and intellectual and cultural exponent of the Right. Maurras believed, like Eliot, that monarchy and aristocracy would protect the humble from the “ambitious politician.”165
Eliot’s interest in Anglo-Catholicism was already inspired by his first visit to England in 1911, when he enthused about visiting Westminster Abbey and other great churches in London. Looking at their great architecture, Eliot saw the living embodiment of a past high culture epitomized by the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren, a royalist commissioned by Charles II to rebuild fifty-one churches after the great fire of 1666.166 Here was the nexus of the pivotal elements of enduring culture: monarchy and faith, under which culture flourished in ways impossible under liberalism and equality.
Eliot, as an employee in the City, could not help contrast the churches that had been built by Wren in grand classical style, and in the tradition of the High Church, with the “hideous banks and commercial houses, the churches being the only redeeming quality of some vulgar street.” He was writing at a time when there was a proposal to demolish nineteen of the churches.167
The proposal for the demolition of “redundant” churches in the City can readily be seen to symbolize the dichotomy of the modern world: the functionalism of commerce destroying the vestiges of high culture. In 1926, a year before Eliot’s official conversion, he and literary scholar Bonamy Dobrée led a hymn-chanting protest through the streets of the City, which succeeded in saving the churches.168
However, Eliot believed in traditions that were locally rooted. This is why he opted to become an Anglo-Catholic, rather than a Roman Catholic, to which he would certainly have converted had he decided to reside in France rather than Britain. Becoming a British citizen and converting to the Church of England were part of the same process, as the religious tradition of a nation was the central ingredient of a national culture. However, churches were degraded by nationalism, and Eliot eschewed the concept of the Church of England as a “national Church.” Rather, it is nationalism that should be predicated on faith, rather than faith serve as a tool of nationalism.169 The Church of England was a national Church, but Eliot thought that it should be “the Catholic Church in England.”170 Anglo-Catholicism is that body within Anglicanism that maintains the Church of England is a branch of Catholicism rather than Protestantism.
CLASSICISM & ROMANTICISM
Founded by T. E. Hulme, English classicism was the other primary element in Eliot’s doctrine. It was an aesthetic outlook that also had a major influence on Eliot’s friends Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis.
Although Eliot imbibed the classicism of Maurras and Hulme in France and Britain respectively, he had already become a classicist under the tutelage of Irving Babbitt at Harvard, who taught a course on “Literary Criticism in France.” His was a non-conformist rejection of egalitarianism and industrialism, and a call for “standards” and “discipline”171 against the orthodox American standard of economic “success” as the measure of all things.
Hence, when Eliot arrived in England he had already become a classicist and had rejected the triumphant doctrines of “progress,” “liberty,” and “equality.” Eliot taught classicism contra romanticism in 1916 at Oxford University as an extension course of six lectures on modern French literature. The courses included a study of Rousseau’s Social Contract and of the French classicist Maurras.172 Rousseau, as the representative of Romanticism, was described by Eliot as involved in a struggle against “authority in matters of religion, aristocracy and privilege in government.” His main doctrinal tendencies were “exaltation of the personal and individual above the typical, emphasis upon feeling rather than thought, humanitarianism: belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature, deprecation of form in art, and glorification of spontaneity.” “His great faults were intense egotism,” and “insincerity.” Eliot wrote in the description of his course:
Romanticism stands for excess in any direction. It splits up into two directions: escape from the world of fact, and devotion to brute fact. The two great currents of the 19th century—vague emotionality and the apotheosis of science (realism) alike spring from Rousseau.173
From Eliot’s cogent description of the two common but antithetical tendencies that spring from Romanticism, we might understand how the French Revolution, proclaimed in the name of “Reason,” assumed the most irrational forms. It erected substitute religions devoted to the “Goddess of Reason” and to the “Supreme Being,” complete with hymns, liturgy, and holy days in the name of the Revolution.
The reaction against Romanticism started at the beginning of the 20th century in “a return to the ideals of classicism.” Eliot explained the principles of classicism as “form and restraint in art, discipline and authority in religion, centralization in government (either as socialism or a monarchy). The classicist point of view has been defined as essentially a belief in Original Sin—the necessity of austere discipline.”
Classicism obviously lends itself to doctrines of the Right, and Eliot refers to this when stating “a classicist in art and literature will be therefore likely to adhere to a monarchical form of government, and to the Catholic Church.”
As for the reference to “socialism” being a manifestation of classicism along with monarchism, what Eliot meant can be discerned from his allusion to “syndicalism, more radical than 19th century socialism.” This and monarchism “express revolt against the same state of affairs, and consequently tend to meet.”
A classicist socialism had been emerging in France from the late 19th century, rejecting the Romanticist origins of the bourgeois Left and the Republic. Elements of the Right around Maurras, and of the Left, represented by the syndicalist Georges Sorel, were synthesizing a doctrine that included royalism and eschewed the old materialist interpretations of socialism. Eliot recognized the development of this movement, referring to “Neo-Catholicism” in France as partly a “political movement associated with monarchism, and partly a reaction against the sceptical scientific view of the 19th century. It is strongly marked in socialistic writers as well. It must not be confused with modernism, which is a purely intellectual movement.”174
Lecture IV dealt with “Royalism and Socialism,” where Eliot, explaining the emerging synthesis, stated that “contemporary socialism has much in common with royalism.” Amongst those studied were Maurras and Sorel, the latter representing a “more violent reaction against bourgeois socialism.”175 This developed into fascism, especially from among the most militant adherents of Action Française, who were impatient with old methods.176 However, Eliot as an Anglo-Catholic seeking the via media was to c
onsider Social Credit as a sufficient mechanism for social change without recourse to the fascism that Ezra Pound mixed with Social Credit.
TRADITION & CULTURE
Eliot’s primary focus was not political but metapolitical. He explained this after the Second World War in his lectures on the unity of European culture, which will be examined below. His writing, his contribution to the corpus of great European Literature, was his statement of rebellion against cultural pathology. He was writing consciously as a member of the European cultural stream:
The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.177
One sees the contrast with the Romantic who is rootless, an individualist of his moment, where nothing other than the Ego is of relevance, and there is no criterion upon which to determine what is “art” and what is junk: cultural nihilism, marketable because there is an audience that is itself rootless.
The artist, then, is part of a tradition, unless art becomes detached and thereby debased, as it now generally is, based on market values and the discernment of art critics who are themselves detached from any tradition. For Eliot and most of the other artists who turned to the Right,178 a flourishing culture meant not flux and continual “innovation” and “experimentation,” which is now lauded as the epitome of artistic “free expression.” Rather, it meant order, duration, and a connection with the past, present, and future. As Eliot pointed out, however, this did not mean stasis and the copying of earlier works. Again, it is the principle of via media. Of the importance of tradition to the artist Eliot wrote:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.179
Tradition thereby establishes a criterion of what “art” is—a far cry from today when we are continually reminded that art is anything that “challenges,” provokes a “reaction,” or has a “message.” Eliot wrote of this artistic criterion:
In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.180
In 1925, Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men,” which describes the state of what can be called Modern Man, who has no attachment, no place in a living tradition. It was written at a time when Eliot had had a breakdown. In her essay and analysis of the poem Heather Van Aelst cogently writes:
“The Hollow Men” is essentially a poem of emptiness, Eliot’s exploration of the state of his own soul as one of many modern souls suffering the same affliction. It is an emptiness caused by the condition of the modern world, a modern world in which men live only for themselves, failing to choose between good and evil. The souls in the poem whose condition we are supposed to be horrified by are not those who have sinned the most, but those who have not chosen whether or not to sin. They exist in a state in-between, a state in which their failure to make a decision causes an utter lack of hope and joy or pain. The heroes of this poem are those who clearly see this state and recognize its true horror.181
It expresses a cultural malady that was of concern to those such as Eliot, Yeats, Campbell, Pound, et al. who sought a way out of the quagmire, making their art their protest, while simultaneously contributing significantly to a tradition that bypasses the culture of the marketplace.
“The Hollow Men” could as well apply to modern man as a new species, represented by the majority within all classes and stations of life:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
Alas! Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
There is not even drama in the death of Western civilization, no last hurrah as in Spengler’s scenario where a resurgence of Tradition led by modern “Caesars” overcomes Money, or as in ancient days, where a vigorous barbarian tribe overwhelms the dominant civilization that has become senile. For our own civilization the question is posed by Eliot as to its ending:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
THE CRITERION
If Western civilization was inexorably heading towards an undramatic, almost indiscernible whimpering dissolution, then at least Eliot was to provide both a warning and an alternative to decline and death. Among Eliot’s most important efforts was the founding of The Criterion, which was published from 1922 to 1939. The intent was to offer a cultural critique of the barbarity of modernism and champion a revival of Christian European culture; to provide an outlet for new writers, and to connect with others across Europe. When Eliot founded The Criterion, his ideas having been well-established since his tutelage under Babbitt at Harvard, he promoted it as a Tory publication representing “reaction” and “revolution,” in opposition to “suburban democracy.”182
First and foremost a Christian traditionalist, Eliot did not see the advent of Fascist Italy as optimistically as did Ezra Pound, although he refused to engage in intellectual tub-thumping, even when the treatment of Jews in National Socialist Germany was provoking widespread criticism. He described the prevailing anti-fascism as an “emotional outlet” for liberals, and as distracting them “from the true evils of their own society.”183 As mentioned earlier, he refused to take a position on the Spanish Civil War,184 and even criticized Oxford when the University declined to participate in the bicentennial celebrations of the University of Göttingen in 1937, in protest against the restrictions against Jews. Eliot’s position was that public institutions should not be political pawns, and that the associations of academics between nations should not be affected.
However, Eliot wondered whether Mussolini did represent “Authority and Tradition,” in the historical European sense.185 He considered it likely that fascism was, like Communism, a substitute religion, and probably incompatible with Catholicism. For Eliot, the monarch and not the dictator symbolized the necessary authority, and this was tempered by the subjection of the throne to “one higher au
thority . . . the Church.”186 His was basically a neo-Medieval outlook.
In 1928, Eliot came to the defense of Maurras who, as leader of the L’Action Française, had been condemned by the Vatican.187 Nearly a decade later he came to the defense of Wyndham Lewis, who did not disguise his sympathies for Fascism or his contempt for the Bloomsbury coterie, Eliot stating that “anyone who is not enthusiastic about the fruits of liberalism must be unpopular with the Anglo-Saxon majority.”188 Even in 1960, Eliot insisted that the word “fascist” is “flung by massenmensch at some, who like Lewis, choose to walk alone.” 189
In the June 1928 issue of The Criterion Eliot clarified his position, stating that the problems with civilization would be studied. He included in that issue a review of Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, by the economic reformer Professor Frederick Soddy,190 whose book was a seminal influence on the thinking of the early banking reformers. The review of the Soddy book (by J. McAlpine) explained that the medieval era had a social order based on the Church, which was organized through guilds, in which “money-dealing,” was condemned, and in which faith was interwoven through the social fabric. The remnants of this traditional order were finally destroyed with the Industrial Revolution and domination by “a cash relationship.” Clearly, Eliot held the same outlook, which was also the outlook of Orage whose influence promoted the careers of many new talents, including Eliot and Pound.
In keeping with this “neo-medievalism,” Eliot sought a return to a rural society, harking back to the organic society that had existed prior to industrialism and urbanization. Hence, in October 1931 Eliot wrote in The Criterion that agriculture ought to be “saved” because it is “the foundation for the good life in society; it is, in fact, the normal life.”